Happy Caturday, folks. This week’s cat pic du jour is Admiral Coco Marshmallow napping. I needed a reminder that she’s often a peaceful, gentle cat rather than the insistent beast who claws at my shoulder while I’m focused on writing.
We’re officially on holidays in our neck of the woods. The Spouse-mouse knocked off work for the year yesterday, and as this week’s update will show, I cleared a rather enormous project of my plate. Our plan is to play board games and chill the fuck out until the New Year.
Anyways, here’s the state of the Eclectic Projects honeydew at the moment.
THE THESIS OF DOOM
Hauling this over the line took way more effort than expected this week, courtesy of last minute tweaks, reformatting, and the sheer what-the-hell absurdity of trying to submit a thesis these days (in the old days, I’d be getting copies bound. Today…so many poorly documented online forms, using a system that is very different from the one they had when I started this process six years ago).
STILL, OH SWEET GOD, ITS DONE! I’ve processed edits and filed paperwork, so I’m not mostly waiting for things to move on the university end so I can upload the final file and mail it out to assessors. This morning was the first time in six years I woke up without the thesis as the nagging, urgent thing on the top of my to-do list.
I don’t mind telling you, I’m a bit lost. That nagging feeling’s been there forever…
WARHOL SLEEPING
The second chapter went live this week, with two more to come before the rest of the serial goes behind the paywall and becomes Patron only. If you need to catch up, the serial has it’s own collection which shows the relevant posts. This bit, incidentally, is what I love about this project.
Caledonian uplift nu-jazz. One of the Big River innovations: cloned lemures with an enhanced consciousness, a saxophone, and a will to create. Chaotic riffs and chittering skat, hyperactive drums to drive the momentum. Music to get freaky by.
Two decades ago, when I first attempted (and failed) to get a PhD, the early drafts of Warhol Sleeping were part of my thesis exploring whether counter-cultural work could still exist in a post-modern media landscape. We had just lived through the cognitive dissonance of beat author and renowned junky William Burroughs being used to sell athletic shoes, and punk icon John Lydon shilling for big butter. The cultural logic of late capitalism took everything confronting and normalised it by transforming everything into a product or a Simpsons gag.
The question of how one fought against an omnivorous post-modern culture intrigued me at twenty, and remains incredibly relevant to me today. I’m not sure I really have an answer. Certainly the stylised, second-person style of Warhol Sleeping developed from that premise, and chapter two remains one of my favourite bits as I layer in the theme around the characters.
ECLECTIC PROJECTS 5
Sat in a holding pattern all week, courtesy of the thesis sucking up time, but on the docket for this break. Deadline for this is the end of the year.
THE SHACKLETON JOB (Resuming January)
There’s two new Shackleton serial entries coming in early January, and I’ll be rolling through the storyline on the same weekly schedule as Warhol Sleeping from that date. There’s the beginning of a new plan for Patreon tied into this—much as I love the magazine, I’ve gotta start putting some longer books out there now the thesis is off my plate, and I’m factoring in some longer serial projects alongside the short fiction.
WRITING ABOUT WRITING
Man, I got distracted as hell by Substack deciding it was okay with monetizing Nazis this week, so lots of my writing-about-writing energy has drifted over to social media. I’ve been urging folks to get off Substack for a while, both because of their prior ethical choices around moderation and their increasingly enshittified user experience.
Will probably start thinking out loud about Patreon, subscription models and readership communities in the very near future while I lock down my thinking about next year.
